Science Fiction and The Other
February – April 2018
Description
As part of her Spring 2018 N.O.P.E. fellowship with 221A, Juli Majer will host Science Fiction and the Other, a semester of programs that consider articulations of alterity — other beings, other worlds, other forms-of-life — as a speculative method for imagining an otherwise present.
Join Majer at Pollyanna 圖書館 Library for a semester of five study sessions where participants will be lead through close readings of speculative texts across fiction and theory. Akin to the science-fictional practice of world-building, this semester will see the making of community through the collective labours of thought, dialogue, and imagination. To complement and cultivate this worlding, Pollyanna 圖書館 Library’s reading room will be repopulated with modular soft furniture made by Sonja Ratkay and Melanie Thibodeau.
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Juli Majer is a visual artist from Vancouver whose practice comprises drawing, ceramics, sculpture, installation, performance, comics, and publishing. Majer conveys psychological and emotional states, which she often mediates through narrative and symbolist imagery of myth and mysticism. Teetering on the precipice of a dense and opaque wormhole, Majer pursues visceral abstractions, inarticulate textures, and peculiar somatic modes of existence.
Notes on Permanent Education (N.O.P.E.) is a collective research program convened by 221A Librarian Vincent Tao.
Documentation
Reading Room
Reading Packets
Acknowledgements
Territory Acknowledgement
221A acknowledges that the area called Vancouver is within the unceded Indigenous territories belonging to the Musqueam, Skxwú7mesh-ulh Úxwumixw (Squamish) and Tsleil-Watututh peoples. 221A recognizes that the colony of British Columbia was created through organized dispossession and colonial violence. 221A seeks to shift its organizational practices to work together with Indigenous people to end ongoing violence, disposession and displacement.
- Vincent Tao’s projects at 221A include Notes on Political Ecologies, N.O.P.E. 2016; Rereading Room: the Vancouver Women’s Bookstore, 2016; Parallax Study: The New Romantics, 2017; and Deep Blue Open Archive, 2017. Tao took part in documenta 14’s aneducation program at Under the Mango Tree—Sites of Learning, travelling to Kassel to present and workshop 221A’s educational programming. His independent research and organizing work concerns urban displacement and the right to the city. Prior to moving to Vancouver, Tao studied at McGill University in Montreal, where he was the outreach coordinator for a worker-run community kitchen.
- Juli Majer is an artist whose work explores heightened emotional and psychological states, imagined worlds, and peculiar modes of existence. Investigating fictional microcosms through drawing, sculpture, and comics, Majer weaves together visceral abstractions, somatic sensations, and inarticulate textures which emerge from relationships between her characters, symbols, objects, and environments.